Name der Zeitschrift: Naharaim Jahrgang: 8 Heft: 2 Seiten: 246-252.

This essay examines the notion of Narrentum (foolishness) in Franz Kafka’s writings, reflecting Walter Benjamin’s engagement with the legacy of Kafka’s fools. The Narr, associated with playfulness, irony, and resistance, provides a comic perspective on the question of being-Jewish. Alongside its Germanic, mostly Baroque, heritage, the Narr incorporates traditional Jewish tropes, primarily rooted in Aggadic traditions. However, in Kafka’s world, the Narr embodies performative skills also linked to Yiddish theatre. In Benjamin’s readings, Kafka’s Narr is associated with the crisis of (...) modern Judaism and with different modes of wisdom. The Narr signifies particular sorts of nihilistic freedom, which Benjamin refers to as redemptive. (shrink)

The article deals with the notion of the “Creature” as being displayed in Joseph Wittig’s essay titled Der Weg zur Kreatur. This piece by Wittig (1879–1949), one of the co-founders of the journal Die Kreatur, himself a banished Catholic thinker, an excommunicated theologian, was published in the third volume of the journal in 1929/1930. The major argument to be presented here, following Wittig’s essay, concerns the path (but also the method) into the world of the creature, namely, the way-back, a (...) regression, which depends on counter-movements, suspensions, gestures of recollection and witnessing. This path is based on the potentialities of the “first question” – a demand for the first word, a proper name for the silent, forgotten creature, being invited to encounter. The encounter with the creatures is a method of thinking, a way of being in this world that is based on the possibility of asking rightly the “first question”. For what this question performs is an attention, hearing of, a method of listening. In asking the question of (and for) the creature, language itself turns toward the world of the creation, in a search for a proper name, calling creation to be heard, to belong. (shrink)

What conceptual merit does the undying – the one that does not die properly – hold? What form of life is left for those who do not achieve death, those that death (the right, the necessity – to die...